Mitsubishi – Connected Car, Design & Discovery

We were approached by Mitsubishi Motors to discuss hedgehog lab collaborating with them on a connected car design brief using the Android Auto operating system to produce a Vision & concepts for their European car launches in 2017 and further.

Our design team were given an open brief and tasked with holding a design sprint to look at direction and areas we could focus our vision for connected cars on – looking at solutions for the short term in 2017, and also mid term for 2020.

Building a vision for the Connected Car

Understanding the problem

Our first step was to strip back and investigate the current issues with HMI interfaces (Human Machine Interfaces) currently on the market and from that investigating the family unit as a multi-user group of one shared connected device, in this case the car.

Exploring solutions & options

This led us to undertake user research and questioning of end users / drivers and understanding how they all use the vehicle differently, highlighting the key values that each user has as their priority when driving. The results across our demographic that ranged from 17-85 years of age were very enlightening.

Focusing our efforts

While we cant go into the depth and detail of what we produced for Mitsubishi here just yet - we can share that the findings from our design sprint / discovery session highlighted both the differing and common areas of how we all interface with our vehicles, and how age and the family group in real life situations define differing interactions/needs.

Prototyping and Sharing our vision

Our design team produced a range of rapid prototypes to highlight key areas of interaction and how they differ across the age ranges & family units we have mentioned above. Now these prototypes are to be tested with key stakeholders and end users so that we can learn more from their interaction.

Test and learn

The whole concept of undertaking a design sprint allows us to very quickly explore and focus on the areas that matter to end users, sharing our vision and very quickly getting prototypes and product in front of them. We can then test and evaluate these to influence further design stages.

Our Vision - The Connected Car

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